Vehicular VLC: A Ray Tracing Study Based on Measured Radiation Patterns of Commercial Taillights

In this letter, we investigate the performance of vehicular visible light communications based on the radiation patterns of different commercial taillights (TLs) using non-sequential ray tracing simulations. Our simulation results indicate a significant variation in the path loss compared with Lambertian model. Based on the ray tracing results, we propose a new path loss model as a function of the propagation distance considering the asymmetrical radiation pattern of TLs. We use this model to derive the attainable transmission distance. We further present the delay spread for various vehicular communication scenarios to demonstrate the effect of neighboring vehicles.